As promised, the robot arm has not languished in the living room. Thursday afternoon, in fact, was spent getting a new motion control board talking to the arm, with great success. Sad as I am to take my custom-made PCB out of the equation, it seems the surest way to actually bring this project to completion in a reasonable time-frame.

There’s a bit more work to do before I’m ready to order 5 more of these boards (one per motor in the arm) — for example, solidifying how the boards will communicate with a computer (RS232? RS485? something else?) and figuring out how to engage and disengage the electromagnetic brakes on three of the motors (the boards don’t seem to have any general purpose I/Os) — but with $85 and a few wires, I’m now significantly further along than I was designing my own circuit board.

2011 – year of the robot bartender?

posted December 25, 2010 – 12:50 pm

Following up on my recent post about ongoing projects, I finished one! Check out the chair I refinished and the ottoman I built to go with it:

It’s been great to get back into woodworking, and things are going well setting up shop in my friends’ basement, conveniently just a few blocks away on Capitol Hill. Some more details on the chair/ottoman are up on the project page here.

You might notice the robot arm, lurking in the background of that shot. I haven’t been slacking entirely on that project, either, having ordered an off-the-shelf motor control board to try out. If it works like I think it does, I should be able to hook one of these up to each motor in the arm and control them via a shared serial bus. But the woodworking has taken up most of my project time, so I haven’t had a chance to play with the controller just yet.

Also, I put up some pictures from my whirlwind, 36-hour trip to New York for a very fun wedding — check them out here.